Democrats’ Dishonest Doc Fix Dodges Deficit
By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Under a fig leaf provided by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats who run the House of Representatives are trying to pull a fast one where healthcare reform is concerned.
Back when he spoke to a joint session of Congress, President Obama outlined his vision for a healthcare reform bill that, while he has yet to put anything to paper that has been released to the public, promised a deficit-neutral outcome. None of the three bills currently before the House met that criteria, in no small measure because the so-called public option is a budget buster.
Lo and behold, the CBO has just produced a preliminary estimate that the latest version of the House bills it has examined would, from a cost perspective, come in just under the wire at $871 billion over 10 years, a figure just inside Obama's $900 billion target. And, said CBO, it would reduce the total federal deficit by forcing reductions in the cost of healthcare all around.
Except these are, in the macro perspective, dishonest numbers.
What Pelosi is proposing to do, and what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada tried and failed to do Wednesday, is strip provisions out of the healthcare reform package that freeze cuts in payments to doctors that are mandated under current law and take them up as a separate piece of legislation that would, therefore, not count toward the healthcare reform bottom line.
The bill, the Medicare Physicians Fairness Act—which on Capitol Hill is also being called the "Doc Fix"—would cost the federal government nearly $250 billion over 10 years which, when it was part of the healthcare bill, boosted the cost well above what Obama told Congress he could accept. As Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Wednesday in opposing it, the payments freeze as currently constructed is just "another quarter of a trillion dollars on the federal credit card."
Without the freeze, doctors would see their Medicare reimbursements drop by 21 percent in 2010 and by 40 percent by 2016. So passing it, in healthcare reform or outside of it, is seen by congressional Democrats as something that is essential if the final bill, whatever it says, is to win the support of the American Medical Association.
More than that, the move to separate out the "doc fix" from the overall reform package has provided yet another lightening rod for critics of Obamacare. As conservative healthcare expert Peter Ferrara puts it, "For the Democrats to put the supposed fix for payments to doctors and hospitals in a separate bill and call the original health overhaul bill deficit neutral is an unprecedented legislative fraud on the American people."
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Tags: healthcare | federal deficit
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Reader Comments
Oh, the Messy Stew, Health Care Reform
It is simply astonishing what a messy stew health care reform is becoming. Avoidance of single payer, a public option, tort reform, and a few other logical moves has led us to the messy stew stage where costs will be unmanageable. Somehow, elimination of excessive diagnostic procedures, elimination of insurers' right to cherry pick those they will insure, elimination of the high overhead costs of private insurers, and a host of other such HAVE TO BE ACCOMPLISHED for health care reform to be worth all the effort. Nibbling around the edges of the problem will not do it, and we're seeing the result of that as a tactic in what Roff has reported.
It's pretty obvious that we're in for big trouble as the solution to the big problem: the health care system's inadequacies in this country. Single payer IS the solution. A Public Option is the next best solution. And tort reform should have been on the table all the while. Where have all the logical approaches gone, for Pete's sake!
Senate Bill 1776 tried same thing
This bill tried the same thing and was defeated this week.
The Democrats are all a buch of crooks and will do anything to get government-controlled healthcare.
The government can't do anything right!
Obama didn't want the swine flu and regular flu vaccine manufacturers to ship the vaccines. No, the government had to interject itself in to the mix and send out the vaccines. Well, they have screwed it up and now we are having slow shipments around the country and many of the targeted groups will not get their shots in time. This our government trying to make vaccines available and screwwing it up. Don't you think they will do the same thing with healthcare reform and make care LESS available? I think so.
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